Declassification Center making slow progress on releasing historical records

Under order from Obama to process more than 400 million pages of records by 2013, the National Declassification Center has so far released 12 million pages to the National Archives. -db Secrecy News Commentary January 26, 2011 By Steven Aftergood The new National Declassification Center (NDC) reviewed 83 million pages of classified historical records in [...]

Sotomayor: Free speech vs. security likely to come before Court

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said yesterday that the nation’s high court likely would be asked again to weigh issues of national security versus free speech because of the recently leaked classified war documents posted on the WikiLeaks website. August 27, 2010 By The Associated Press DENVER — Sotomayor told high school and college students [...]

Wikileaks criticized for ‘clumsy disclosure’

Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News argues that WikiLeaks disclosure of the Afghan War Diary has had the unfortunate consequence of increasing public support for the present system of document classification. -db Secrecy News Commentary August 16, 2010 By Steven Aftergood Unauthorized disclosures of classified information (“leaks”) often play an important role in the proper functioning [...]

Experts say Posterous and Tumblr may promote government transparency

Some praise the speed and ease of social media such as Posterous and Tumblr and suggest that government agencies could use them to attract more readers to important government studies. But one open government expert urges caution in that Posterous and Tumblr are closed, proprietary systems, and there is no substitute for the government publishing its primary [...]

Court hears arguments against government penalization of false statements

A federal court of appeals heard arguments this week on whether the government can impose criminal penalties on a man for falsely claiming he served in the military and earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. The man was convicted of violating the Stolen Valor Act which prohibits lying about military service. -DB Metropolitan News-Enterprise November [...]